Arriving in the Unites States a couple of months before the most consequential Presidential election since the last one, I came with some trepidation. Trepidation about the outcome, certainly. But also about what the process might be doing to those I would be living among.
I am living in leafy New England, up in Boston, so that provides a particular context. The papers we get each day are filled with campaign news and analysis as you would expect. Amongst the Americans I live with in Jesuit community, and others in classes where I study, the election hangs in the air. Sort of. It is not a constant source of conversation. Maybe people recognise that everything meaningful to be said has been said on this one.
In the two months I have been here it seems the news stories have moved across three phases. It’s not neatly cut-and-dry but the narratives seem to have come in clusters.
In the wake of the Harris elevation and the Vice-Presidential nominations, the personal narratives abounded.
Arriving in mid-August the Harris stories were still going but the grand narrative was in place. Waltz was being given the full narrative treatment as stories dripped out, like a biography in fragments. His time coaching high school football, his many visits to China, his support of a gay-straight school student alliance in the ‘90s. Each a well-crafted story.
J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate was getting similar treatment. Recollections of his time in the Marines. Detailed recounting of his conversion to Catholicism, and ensuing baptism and confirmation in Ohio in 2019.
Trump, having been through two national campaigns, has had his story well told. Although the narratives of his various legal proceedings keep emerging.
'Increasingly we seem to be in for a third kind of election reporting: who will win and how. This undergirds all the election stories, of course, but with the personal narratives established and the policy specifics mostly avoided we seem to be into the mechanics of winning.'
Depending on which media outlet was telling which story, the emphasis in any of these personal stories would shift. But clearly, they were meeting a need the campaigns and the media saw to introducing new candidates as people. Voters want to have some sense of the kind of person they are voting for.
Just as the narratives began to solidify, as much as its convenient for campaign biographies to do so, the stories shifted to seek